(2 Samuel 22:1-4, Micah 7:8-20; Luke 1:57-80)
I have to admit, this passage from Luke gave me fits. There’s a lot of interesting things to say about it, but I don’t just want to stand up here and tell you interesting stuff; and I had trouble finding the sermon in it. To be sure, it’s a great story. Elizabeth gives birth, and her family and the whole community rejoice. They wait to name the baby until he’s circumcised, and everyone around assumes he’s going to be named Zechariah after his father—until Elizabeth interrupts, “No, he’s going to be called John.”
Well, now that wasn’t how things were done, because sons were supposed to be named after fathers or grandfathers, and John wasn’t a family name. The neighbors seem to have figured Elizabeth was cutting her husband out of the decision—they clearly thought he was deaf as well as mute—so they asked him directly; to their surprise he wrote, quite emphatically, “His name is John.” Note that—not will be, but is. God named that baby before he was even conceived, and he’s been called John since before he even existed. With that, Zechariah’s speech is restored, and he begins praising God—and the community falls back in fear, recognizing that God is at work, wondering who on Earth this child is going to be. It’s a great scene, and it would be easy to talk about Zechariah putting his faith in God and receiving his reward; but is that really the point?
Then you have this great song of praise, commonly called the Benedictus; interestingly, he’s praising God for giving him a son, but that’s really not the focus of his song. It’s been said that every man wants his son to be a star, but we don’t see that in Zechariah’s words; instead, he essentially says, never mind the star, the sun is rising—and my son, you get to go ahead of him to let everyone know he’s coming. It’s a wonderful declaration, drawing once again on Malachi, which we read a couple weeks ago. It would be easy to turn it into a nice little moral lesson about how we should value people for how they point us to Christ, not for how impressive they are in themselves; which is true enough, but that isn’t the gospel heartbeat in this passage.
More interesting is verse 72, which our English translations blunt a little bit. Zechariah declares that God has raised up a horn of salvation for his people—the image is of the horn of an ox, with which it strikes and drives back its enemies—and then he says, “to do mercy to our ancestors.” Again, the idea here is the Old Testament word hesed; our concept of mercy tends to be pretty passive and pallid, just a matter of letting the guilty off the hook, but here we see the biblical concept of the faithful, covenant-making love and mercy of God as an active force, God taking decisive and powerful action to deliver his people. And even more interesting, Zechariah says that in bringing his people salvation from their enemies, God is doing mercy to their ancestors—he is fulfilling the covenant promises he made to them.
If you really stop and consider what Zechariah is saying, you have to be struck by the grand sweep of his vision; and here, I think, we strike something that is the gospel word for us this morning. We have the real tendency to collapse our view of God’s salvation to just one thing. Classically, for evangelicals, it’s personal individual spiritual salvation from sin, which can lead into a sort of “me ’n’ Jesus” isolationism. Equally classically, for liberals, it’s social justice—political liberation from oppressive societal structures. With the American evangelical move into political engagement that began a few decades ago, salvation began to be somewhat identified with moral transformation of the culture. You wind up with dueling theologies as political campaigns.
None of these visions of salvation is big enough; none matches the vision God gave Zechariah. There is definitely a political element to the deliverance he foresees, as the enemies of the people of God will no longer be able to oppress them—they will be removed as enemies, either by their destruction or by being brought to repentance. That cannot be removed from the picture, because the deliverance God promises is not merely internal and subjective. At the same time—and this is where so many in Israel missed the boat—his deliverance is not merely political, either; the language of verses 77-79 goes far beyond that. The Lord will deliver his people, not merely from political bondage to Rome, but from spiritual bondage to sin; he will free them, and guide them by his light, so that they will at last walk in the way of his peace.
Now, here again we have a word that cannot be captured by its English translation, though shalom is rather better known. This doesn’t just mean “peace” as in “peace and quiet” or “not fighting.” Rather, the idea in this word is of being in complete harmony, first of all with God and his will, and thus, second, within yourself—resulting in a calm, unshakeable sense that all is well, and freedom from anxiety; this in turn creates harmony with others, to the extent that they are willing to be at peace with you. A life of shalom is a life lived in tune with God, ordered by his order, in accordance with his will. This is the life to which Jesus will call those who believe in him, and which he will make possible for those who believe in him.
Along with this, there’s also the aspect of his salvation we see in verses 74-75: God is fulfilling his promise to Abraham “to rescue us from the hand of our enemies and to enable us to serve him without fear in holiness and righteousness before him all our days.” This is what we might call the social aspect—the bridge between our individual deliverance from sin and the political deliverance of the people of God from those who do evil: God saves us in order that we may serve him with our whole lives, and in fact that opportunity to serve is part of the blessing he gives us. That service is not merely activity on God’s behalf, but is a way of life submitted in humble obedience to him—conformed to his holiness and righteousness, accepting his definition of what is good and right rather than insisting on our own ideas and preferences.
The salvation of God in Jesus Christ unites all these elements, because God is on about redeeming a people for his name; he saves us as individuals, but not just as individuals, and he isn’t saving us only from our individual sin, but from all the sin of all of us together. That’s why Paul in 2 Corinthians describes the work Jesus has entrusted to us as “the ministry of reconciliation,” because in delivering us from our sin and giving us peace with him, part of his purpose is to give peace between us—to cleanse the sin not only from our own hearts, but from our relationships. As he gives us the humility to bow before him and accept his good instead of our own, so too he gives us the humility to bow before each other and accept each other’s good instead of our own.
God is on about redeeming our hearts, our relationships, our families, our churches, our culture, our society, our nation, our world—in fact, all of creation. His deliverance comes at every level; his salvation operates in every area, in every aspect. He will not stop until the knowledge of him fills the earth as the waters fill the sea, and all people bow the knee to him as the only Lord and God, the only authority, the only one to be obeyed, the only one deserving of worship.